Get Ready, Here Come More Google AdWords Account Bans

The mass AdWords banning that has continued on since late September of this year is just going to get worse. Google told me last night that they are stepping up the account level bans and making them permanent on the account level.

Nick Fox of Google told me Google is now better at enforcement and able to offer more comprehensive enforcement of their existing policies. This is why they have decided to step up these efforts by banning not just sites from advertising, but complete accounts and permanently stopping them from signing up for new accounts (they have ways).

In the past, I complained that Google replied to AdWords advertisers with lame responses. Fox promised me that the communication process with these account bans have been improved. All accounts that are being banned will get an email from Google telling them they have been banned and instructing them how to appeal the ban. All appeals will get a response from Google, no matter what.

In keeping with our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, we spend a tremendous amount of time and effort monitoring the quality of our search and ad results. As we've stated many times before, Google's primary focus is on delivering the best possible search experience to our end users. To help further this goal, we work with our advertisers in a number of different ways to help them design and run the best ads possible.

Unfortunately, some online advertisers continue to promote services and websites that do not help, and in some cases could harm, our users. For instance, these advertisers may offer free services that bait users into accepting hidden fees. Or these advertisers may attempt to deliver malware to unsuspecting web citizens. Regardless of the practice, these types of campaigns do not benefit our users and we therefore take steps to enforce our policies and prevent such advertisers from running ads through our systems.

Over the last decade Google has implemented a number of systems and processes to identify and disable ads that direct users to these offending websites. However, the ad disabling procedures have resulted in ongoingback and forth between us and these questionable advertisers as they try to outsmart our systems and processes. Therefore, we're being stricter with advertisers who deliver a bad user experience by permanently disabling AdWords accounts that engage in prohibited behavior.

Recently we began implementing this new account disabling. As a result, many advertisers who provide a poor user experience and have previously had their ads disabled will now have their accounts disabled.

We take our user, advertiser and publisher experiences very seriously, and remain dedicated to delivering only the highest quality advertising results to our users. We believe this new process of permanently disabling accounts will markedly improve the overall experience of our users, advertisers and publishers.